Speaking to One’s Superiors: Petitions as cultural heritage and sources of knowledge

The purpose of this project is to enhance accessibility to and knowledge of a historical source – petitions to county governors – used relatively little in Sweden, and to use this source to answer questions about people’s ways of supporting themselves and claiming rights in the past. The project also contributes to the long-term goal of making handwritten texts machine-readable.

Globala möten

Project description

Petitions have their name from the Latin verb peto: go to, beseech, entreat. The right to petition is vital to our understanding of pre-modern political life. While not democratic in the modern sense of the word, communities and societies that acknowledged people's right to present petitions cannot be described as despotic or absolutist either. Petitions allowed the powerless to speak to the powerful, including both women and men. The project is managed by representatives of departments at Uppsala University and Riksarkivet (Swedish National Archives). The involved departments are the History department, the department of Linguistics and Philology, and the department of Information technology.

Learn more about the project on its website and in the presentation of the project on Digarv.

Jezzica Israelsson, “Supplikmål till länsstyrelsen”, i Fantastiska verb. Hur man fångar uppgifter om kön och arbete, Västmanland 1720-1880, Jonas Lindström, red., Opuscula Historica Upsaliensia 58 (Uppsala 2020).

Linda Oja, Kärt besvär. Vägledning till supplikmaterialet i myndighetsarkiven. Landsarkivets i Uppsala småskrifter nr 11 (Uppsala, 2020).

Linda Oja, “Att tillgängliggöra supplikmaterial”, Historisk tidskrift (Stockholm, 2020), vol. 140, nr. 4.

Linda Oja, “Bergslagens hjärtefrågor speglade i 1700-talets suppliker”, Bergslagshistoria 2021.

Maria Ågren, “Att tilltala överheten: Suppliker som kulturarv och källa till kunskap” i Årsbok för Kungliga Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien (2022).

Ellinor Lindqvist, Eva Pettersson & Joakim Nivre, “To the Most Gracious Highness, from Your Humble Servant: Analysing Swedish 18th-Century Petitions Using Text Classification”. Proceedings of the 6th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature 2022.

Ellinor Lindqvist, Eva Pettersson & Joakim Nivre, “Low-Resource Techniques for Analysing the Rhetorical Structure of Swedish Historical Petitions”. Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Resources and Representations for Under-Resourced Languages and Domains (RESOURCEFUL-2023).

Örjan Kardell, “Supplikers väg genom länsstyrelsen i Örebro”, Arkiv. En tidskrift om informationshanteringens alla aspekter nr. 2 (2023).

Örjan Kardell, “Administrativ praktik. Länsstyrelsens i Örebro län handläggning av suppliker 1758-1770”, insänt till tidskriften Scandia (2024).

Maria Ågren et al., "Att tilltala överheten. Suppliker som kulturarv och källa till kunskap", i slutpublikation från Digarv-satsningen. Makadam Förlag 2025 (under arbete).

Maria Ågren, Maria.Agren@hist.uu.se

Project details

 

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